Derzhprom, the House of State Industry, is a large governmental building at the centre of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. It is also arguably the most interesting – and one of the least known – buildings of the “heroic age” of modern architecture in the interwar years.
One reason why it isn’t as famous as it could be is that Kharkiv is not particularly well-known outside of Ukraine; another because the architects who designed it were not among the theory-spinning ideologues and stars of the modern movement. Had it been built in Berlin or Paris, however, you’d definitely know all about it.
Occupying the centre of a vast circular plaza are three clusters of concrete-and-glass towers, whose height ranges from five to 10 storeys. They’re symmetrical, but you can only tell if you stand right in the middle of the square. On their own these would be impressive enough – an instant skyline of mini-skyscrapers built up all at once – but what really makes Derzhprom is the series of interconnecting skybridges between each cluster, shooting across and up as high as eight storeys.
Here are the motifs of western architecture in the 1960s: an angular, ultra-metropolitan architecture of vaulting bridges and clustered high-rises, invented several decades early in eastern Ukraine. Here is “brutalism”, three decades before the term was coined.
Sometimes the building turns up in architectural histories, but always as if someone has chanced upon it. Usually it is miscredited in terms of its age, its architects and its function – sometimes as an office block, sometimes a factory. The reality is more dramatic.
To understand the building’s crazed ambition, its monumental scale and its determined avoidance of any historic reference or cliche, you need to know that Kharkiv was the capital of “Soviet Ukraine” from 1919 to 1934. An industrial, Russophone city, this was where the Ukrainian Bolsheviks placed their capital after an uprising at Kiev’s Arsenal plant failed in early 1918, suppressed by the vaguely social democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic that then ruled the city as the Russian Empire collapsed.
The Derzhprom was intended as the central building, the Houses of Parliament as it were, of an entire country – a function which became obsolete in less than a decade after it was built.
Many Ukrainian Bolsheviks considered any concession to local nationalism to be “bourgeois”, but Lenin disagreed, forcing them into a coalition with the Borotbists, a left-wing Ukrainian nationalist party. After victory in the post-revolutionary civil war and joining the new USSR in 1922, the new Ukrainian Soviet Republic took federation seriously.
Its laws and policies were often more radical even than those of the Russian Soviet Republic, while a determined effort was made to “Ukrainise” the Russophone cities – in government, education, the press and the arts (something pursued especially avidly by the “national communist” commissar of education, Mykola Skrypnyk).
“Away from Moscow!” was the slogan propounded by avant-garde groups such as New Generation. Kharkiv was intended to be a real rather than a ceremonial capital, but unlike Kiev, the rival Ukrainian People’s Republic’s capital and the historic capital of Kievan Rus, it lacked big, declarative public buildings. This problem was to be solved at one stroke.
At a public competition in 1925, a plan put forward by the local architect Viktor Trotsenko was accepted. The governmental centre would take the form of a circus penetrated by an enormous wedge of empty space – now called Freedom Square, the second-largest square in Europe at the time it was built. The team of Sergei Serafimov, Samuel Kravets and Mark Felger – obscure young academic architects from Odessa and Vilnius – proposed to fill this with towers in a minimal, unpretentious modern idiom, modelled more on the style of the glassy “daylight factories” of Detroit and the interconnected skyscrapers of Chicago, than on Le Corbusier or the Bauhaus.
By 1926 it was under way, and was finished in 1928 when the Ukrainian Soviet Republic’s central committee, commissariats, planning commissions, various industrial enterprises, a library and even a hotel were aptly clustered together in its towers. It became the first complex of skyscrapers in Europe, and perhaps unsurprisingly, had many visitors.
While numbers of “tourists of the revolution” stopped to be awed by these towers with their rush of glass surfaces – full-height, 10-storey glazed stairwells and long skyways lined with windows – the avant-garde of Soviet architects, the likes of El Lissitzky or Ivan Leonidov, didn’t think it went nearly far enough. Ironically, their unbuilt and unbuildable buildings are more famous.
However, this is one of the very few built structures to give an impression of what a constructivist city might have been like: a delirious crashing together of Americanism and communism.
But for the purpose it was built, as the headquarters of Ukrainian communism, its days were numbered almost as soon as it opened. As early as 1929, the “national communists” began to be repressed; by 1932, famine was raging in the countryside around, and refugees flocked to Kharkiv. Mykola Skrypnyk, the commissar who had tried hardest to reconcile Ukrainian cultural nationalism and Bolshevik communism, shot himself in his office in one of the towers in 1933.
The following year, the Ukrainian Republic moved to Kiev, and the building became the House of State Industry – shortened to Derzhprom in Ukrainian, and Gosprom in Russian.
The building survived several attempts by its Nazi occupiers to blow it up in 1942-3 – as well as the re-cladding of its modernist neighbours in heavy neoclassical style in the 1950s; the placing of a radio transmitter on top of one of the towers in the same decade; an inept partial renovation 50 years later (a white paint job that stopped at the front facade); and the destruction of the Lenin statue in front of it last year.
Having withstood numerous swings of local politics from Ukrainisation to Russification and back, it stands both dynamic and still. No building in the former Soviet Union expresses so vividly the undercurrents of utopian socialism and Americanised modernism that ran through the Communist revolution’s early years.
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